Changing Families Fuel Need For Care

Centers Offer

Adults, Caregivers

Some Time Out

They were the lifeblood of America in the 1940s and '50s: business owners, scientists and military men, fathers and mothers, leaders and lovers.

The last thing they ever wanted, what they fought and prayed against, was to burden their families in their old age. When they got sick and slow and needy. When their bodies and minds rebelled.

That's why these men and women, with their wheelchairs and canes, come to the Mae Volen Senior Center in Boca Raton and to similar programs throughout South Florida that offer adult day care.

"It gives my wife a chance to get rid of me," Allan Cohen,83, said at Mae Volen. "Every community in the world should have a program like this. It gives everyone relief. My wife, my family, myself."

As families today struggle with what often seems like an impossible dilemma - finding a reasonable way to care for an aging spouse, parent or grandparent who is too old to live independently but too active for a nursing home - experts say the need for adult day care has surged.

Although day care for adults has been around for years changes in the American family have prompted the sudden demand for services.

For one thing, people are living longer. Seniors - those 60 or older as defined by the U.S. Commission on Aging - make up the fastest-growing age group, the agency reports. The average life span is about 75 years, compared with 68 in 1950 and 47 in 1900.

For another, families of the 1990s are busy, with both parents usually trying to manage careers and personal lives, leaving little time to care for an aging relative.

Families also are more spread out, no longer living near parents or grandparents, lifelong neighbors or friends who can all pitch in as caregivers. In Florida, the elderly often live away from their families, leaving one spouse to try to care for another.

"All of these different pictures are why day care is becoming so essential," said Edith Lederberg, executive director of the Area Agency on Aging of Broward County. "You no longer have a three-generation family. You now have a four- or five-generation family. The need for adult day care grows each year."

Broward County has 335,000 full-time residents older than 60; Palm Beach County has about 274,000. Among the seniors 65 and older in Broward and Palm Beach counties, more than 70,000 are considered frail or disabled by the state, according to 1993 statistics from the state Department of Elder Affairs.

Like Delray Beach resident Lew Arenson, 81, who had a stroke 10 years ago and now walks with a cane. He has been coming to the Mae Volen day care center for seven years so he can spend the day among friends: reading in a roomful of recliners and couches, singing Big Band-era songs, taking part in trivia contests and wheelchair exercises.

"People our age who can't get around can come here so we don't just mope," he said.

His friend, Jack Berger, 81, had a stroke two years ago. His wife was worried that he would fall when she left him alone to shop or garden, so the two decided Jack should enroll in day care.

"If you're together 24 hours a day, that can be very hard," Berger said. "And I like it here. We had a belly dancer a few weeks ago - oh yeah - a very pretty girl. But we didn't tell our wives about that. Are you crazy? You think we want to get whacked?''

Spending time in a day care program brings life full circle for these seniors, who come to the centers on buses and often bring in notes from home.

No bananas for Oscar. Cut up Jimmy's chicken. Watch Louis for choking.

They drink from the same size milk carton that are served to youngsters in school. They eat from similar lunch trays, use similar tables and chairs. They wear name tags and smiley-face stickers for easy identification, sing songs like Yankee Doodle Dandee and On Moonlight Bay, and spend hours working on jigsaw puzzles and arts and crafts.

But this time around, they're not out to learn how to count or spell.

They just want to be among friends, among a staff of caregivers who will listen to their stories and make them feel proud about their lives.

Most day care centers are funded through a combination local, state and federal dollars and participants can often pay on a sliding-scale basis. There are a host of day care programs just for Alzheimer's patients.

Many centers have waiting lists, as center officials struggle to expand programs as quickly as possible.

Some seniors don't like the thought of day care. So several centers offer programs where a volunteer visits at home several hours a week to allow the caregiver time out of the house.

At the Northeast Focal Point Senior Center in Deerfield Beach, an intergenerational day care program in which Alzheimer's patients mix with physically disabled clients, opened six weeks ago. The seniors often interact with children, who attend a traditional day care program located a building away.

The city of Deerfield Beach gave the center more than $77,000 to start the adult day care program.

"We have long needed an adult day care center here," said nurse Ilene Hurwitz, who helps run the program. "We've got to give the caregivers a breather. And our frail elderly a place to go."